This week, Notre Dame Law School is hosting its second annual Death Penalty Abolition Week. Among the speakers are two men who, between them, spent nearly 60 years on death row for crimes they did not commit.
Elwood Jones was convicted of aggravated murder in Ohio in 1996 and sentenced to death. He spent 27 years on death row. Throughout those three decades, he maintained his innocence and refused every plea deal that would have shortened his sentence in exchange for admitting to a crime he did not commit. In December 2025, Hamilton County Prosecutor Connie Pillich formally dismissed the case, saying she was “not convinced that Mr. Jones killed Rhoda Nathan.” He was 57 years old when he walked free.
Anthony Ray Hinton was convicted of two murders in Alabama in 1985 and sentenced to death. He spent nearly 30 years on death row. The only evidence linking him to the crimes was the testimony of state lab technicians who said the bullets from the crime scene matched a revolver found in his mother’s home. In 2014, the United States Supreme Court ordered a new trial after finding that Hinton’s trial attorney had been constitutionally ineffective. Independent forensic analysis (the kind his original attorney failed to obtain) showed that the bullets did not match the revolver. All charges were dismissed in 2015.
These are not abstract policy arguments. These are two men who woke up every morning for decades in a cell on death row, knowing they were innocent, knowing the system had failed them, and knowing that the state was prepared to execute them for something they did not do.
The Numbers That Should Keep Everyone Awake
Since 1973, at least 202 people who were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the United States have been exonerated. That is 202 people the system got wrong in the most serious category of criminal case, with the most extensive review process, and the highest stakes.
The Death Penalty Information Center tracks these cases in a comprehensive database. The ratio is stark: for every 8 people executed in the United States, 1 person has been exonerated from death row. One in eight.
But the exoneration count almost certainly understates the problem. A landmark 2014 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used survival analysis to estimate the true rate of false convictions among death sentences. The researchers concluded that if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely, at least 4.1% would be exonerated. That is one in twenty-five. And the authors emphasized that this is a conservative estimate because most death-sentenced defendants are eventually resentenced to life in prison, at which point the resources devoted to reviewing their cases drop sharply, and the likelihood of uncovering a wrongful conviction plummets.
In other words: there are almost certainly innocent people who have been executed, and there are almost certainly innocent people on death row right now whose convictions will never be overturned because no one is looking anymore.
What Causes Wrongful Convictions in Capital Cases
The Death Penalty Information Center’s analysis of death row exonerations reveals a consistent set of systemic failures. These are not freak accidents. They are patterns that repeat across jurisdictions, across decades, and across racial lines.
Official Misconduct
69% of death row exonerations involve official misconduct by police, prosecutors, or other government officials. This includes suppression of exculpatory evidence (Brady violations), fabrication of evidence, coerced confessions, manipulation of witnesses, and failure to disclose deals made with jailhouse informants. Anthony Ray Hinton’s case is a textbook example: the detectives told him they did not care whether he committed the crime and that he would be convicted because he was Black. The system was not trying to find the truth. It was trying to close a case.
Texas has its own chapter in this history and it’s one that changed state law permanently.
Michael Morton was convicted in 1987 of murdering his wife Christine in Williamson County and spent nearly 25 years in prison. In 2011, DNA testing of evidence that had been suppressed by Williamson County prosecutor Ken Anderson exonerated Morton entirely. Anderson had withheld a note Christine Morton had written and left on the kitchen counter that pointed away from Michael. He had withheld witness statements describing a stranger in the neighborhood on the day of the murder. He had withheld his own investigator’s report. Anderson later resigned from the bench and was briefly jailed for contempt in the only known instance of a prosecutor being criminally punished for a Brady violation in American history.
Morton’s case did not just exonerate one man. It changed Texas law. In 2013, the Texas Legislature passed the Michael Morton Act, amending Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 39.14. For the first time, Texas prosecutors were required to produce their entire file to the defense and not just the evidence they chose to share, but everything. The open-file discovery requirement the Morton Act created is now the baseline standard for all felony cases in Texas. Every defense attorney who today receives full prosecution discovery in a Texas felony owes that right, in part, to Michael Morton’s 25 years.
But the Morton Act left a gap. It required prosecutors to share evidence with the defense. It did not require police to share evidence with prosecutors. That gap is exactly what destroyed Richard Miles’s life.
Richard Miles was convicted of murder and attempted murder in Dallas County in 1995 for a May 1994 shooting at a gas station. He spent nearly 15 years in prison. What freed him was the eventual discovery of internal Dallas Police Department memoranda which was sitting in the police file, never disclosed to prosecutors and never disclosed to the defense that identified other suspects, including one who had allegedly confessed to the crime. Miles was released in 2009 and officially exonerated by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on February 15, 2012, in what his attorneys described as the first non-DNA exoneration without a confession in the state. Since his release, Miles has run Miles of Freedom, a Dallas nonprofit supporting people returning from incarceration. He was named a CNN Hero in 2019.
Miles’s case exposed a structural problem that the Morton Act had not addressed: police departments had no legal obligation to ensure they had handed over everything in their possession to prosecutors. Evidence could sit in a detective’s file for years while an innocent person sat in a cell. In 2021, the Texas Legislature closed that gap with the Richard Miles Act. The law requires law enforcement agencies to ensure that all evidence in their possession has been disclosed to the prosecutor — including information learned after conviction. Together, the Michael Morton Act and the Richard Miles Act form a complete discovery chain: police must give everything to prosecutors, and prosecutors must give everything to the defense.
The Texas Discovery Chain: Police → Prosecutors → Defense. The Michael Morton Act (2013, CCP Art. 39.14) and the Richard Miles Act (2021) together require both links in this chain to be honored. Both laws exist because Texas prosecutors and police withheld evidence from innocent men. Both men paid with decades of their lives.
Perjury and False Accusation
Two-thirds of death row exonerations (67.6%) involved perjury or false accusation. Witnesses lied on the stand. Informants fabricated testimony in exchange for deals. Victims misidentified suspects. And in many cases, the prosecution knew or should have known that the testimony was unreliable. The rate is even higher for defendants of color: perjury or false accusation was a factor in 70.7% of cases involving Black exonerees and 93.8% of cases involving Latino exonerees.
Inadequate Defense
Anthony Ray Hinton’s case turned on forensic ballistics evidence. The state’s lab technicians said the bullets matched his mother’s revolver. Hinton’s trial attorney, operating under the mistaken belief that the state would only pay $1,000 for a defense expert, hired a forensic examiner who was visually impaired and whose testimony was, by the Supreme Court’s later assessment, ineffective. When qualified independent experts finally examined the bullets decades later, they found that the bullets did not match the revolver. Thirty years on death row because the defense attorney did not get the right expert.
This is not an outlier. Inadequate defense counsel is a recurring factor in wrongful capital convictions. Defendants who cannot afford private attorneys are assigned public defenders who are often overworked, underfunded, and lack the resources to conduct thorough investigations, hire qualified experts, or mount the kind of defense that capital cases require.
Flawed Forensic Science
The forensic evidence that sent Anthony Ray Hinton to death row (ballistics comparison testimony from state lab technicians) is part of a broader pattern of forensic science failures in capital cases. The National Academy of Sciences and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) have documented significant reliability problems in several forensic disciplines that are routinely used in criminal prosecutions, including bite mark analysis, hair comparison, fiber analysis, arson investigation, and pattern-matching disciplines like ballistics and fingerprints.
In many wrongful conviction cases, the forensic evidence was not merely inconclusive. It was wrong. Analysts testified with false certainty. Methodologies that had never been scientifically validated were presented to juries as reliable. And defense attorneys who lacked scientific training were unable to challenge the testimony effectively.
Racial Bias
The racial dimensions of wrongful capital convictions are stark. Of the 202 death row exonerees, 63.8% are people of color, and 53.5% are Black. Black death row exonerees spent an average of 4.3 years longer in prison before being cleared than white exonerees. Official misconduct was a factor in 78.7% of cases involving Black defendants, compared to 58.2% of cases involving white defendants. The system does not fail everyone equally.
The Irreversibility Problem
Every wrongful conviction is a catastrophe. But a wrongful conviction that results in execution is unique in one respect: it cannot be fixed.
If a person is wrongly convicted and sentenced to prison, the error can be corrected. The conviction can be overturned. The person can be released. They can never get back the years they lost, but they can live the rest of their life as a free person. Elwood Jones lost 27 years. Anthony Ray Hinton lost 30. Michael Morton lost nearly 25. Richard Miles lost nearly 15. But they are alive. They are free. Two of them are speaking at Notre Dame this week, telling their stories, and working to prevent the system from doing to someone else what it did to them.
If any of them had been executed, there would be no story to tell. There would be no exoneration. There would be no correction. There would be no Michael Morton Act. There would be no Richard Miles Act. The state would have killed an innocent person, and everything that followed from that person’s survival — including the legal reforms their cases produced — would not exist.
This is not a hypothetical concern. The 4.1% false conviction rate estimated by the PNAS study means that, statistically, innocent people have almost certainly been executed in the United States. We cannot name them with certainty because once the execution occurs, the resources and attention devoted to reviewing the case evaporate. As one researcher put it: we find the wrongful convictions on death row because we are looking. We do not find them after execution because we stop looking.
What This Means in Texas
Texas has executed more people than any other state in the modern era of the death penalty. It also has one of the country’s most active capital defense systems, a robust appellate process, and — as Michael Morton and Richard Miles demonstrate — a direct legislative record of responding to wrongful convictions with statutory reform.
But legislation fixes the rules going forward. It does not fix the cases that preceded it. The Michael Morton Act was passed in 2013; Morton had already served 25 years. The Richard Miles Act was passed in 2021; Miles had already served 15. The law caught up to the injustice after the damage was done. That is the pattern. The question for any defendant facing serious charges in Texas today is whether their defense is going to rely on the system catching its own mistakes after the fact or whether it is going to be built from the beginning to prevent those mistakes from occurring.
Capital Murder Defense: Where the Quality of Counsel Matters Most
Under Texas Penal Code §19.03, capital murder carries only two possible sentences: life without parole or death. There is no middle ground. The bifurcated trial structure under CCP Article 37.071 requires the jury to answer special issues, including future dangerousness and the existence of mitigating circumstances. A single juror’s holdout on any special issue results in a life sentence rather than death.
The quality of the defense in a capital case is not a luxury. It is a constitutional requirement. Wiggins v. Smith (2003) and Rompilla v. Beard (2005) established that defense counsel in a capital case has an affirmative obligation to investigate the defendant’s background for mitigating evidence. Failure to do so, as in Hinton’s case where the attorney failed to obtain qualified forensic experts, is constitutionally ineffective assistance of counsel.
Forensic Science Challenges in Capital Cases
The forensic science failures that contributed to Anthony Ray Hinton’s wrongful conviction (i.e. unreliable ballistics testimony from a state lab) are the same categories of forensic evidence that appear in Texas capital cases. Blood spatter analysis, ballistics, DNA mixture interpretation, and forensic pathology are all disciplines where the NAS and PCAST have identified reliability concerns. A defense team that cannot challenge this evidence at the scientific level, that accepts the state’s forensic conclusions at face value, is not providing constitutionally adequate representation in a capital case.
At Deandra Grant Law, our forensic science credentials exist for exactly this reason. Deandra Grant’s ACS-CHAL Forensic Lawyer-Scientist designation and Master’s Degree in Pharmaceutical Science, Doug Huff’s ACS-CHAL designation and digital forensics training, and our relationships with independent forensic experts across multiple disciplines give us the ability to challenge the state’s forensic evidence at the level required in the highest-stakes cases in the system.
The Mitigation Investigation
In capital cases, the mitigation investigation is often the difference between life and death. This is the work that presents the defendant’s full story to the jury: the trauma, the mental health history, the family circumstances, the capacity for rehabilitation. When one juror says “life” instead of “death” on the special issue answers, it is almost always because the mitigation investigation gave them a reason to.
The Defense Imperative
Elwood Jones and Anthony Ray Hinton were innocent. Michael Morton was innocent. Richard Miles was innocent. They should never have been convicted. But they were and they survived only because someone eventually did the work that should have been done at trial or because the suppressed evidence was eventually uncovered. Independent forensic analysis. Thorough investigation. Competent, resourced defense counsel who understood the science and the law. And, in Morton’s and Miles’s cases, decades of advocacy that ultimately changed the rules for everyone who comes after them.
Not every defendant facing serious charges is innocent. But every defendant is entitled to a defense that leaves no stone unturned, that challenges every piece of forensic evidence, that conducts a full mitigation investigation, that demands complete discovery under the Michael Morton Act and the Richard Miles Act, and that holds the prosecution to its burden at every stage. The 4.1% false conviction rate exists because, too often, that defense is not provided.
The lesson of Death Penalty Abolition Week is not just that innocent people are sentenced to death. It is that the quality of the defense is the single most important variable in whether the system catches its own mistakes before they become irreversible. When the defense is inadequate, the innocent are convicted. When the defense is competent, forensically trained, and properly resourced, the system works the way it is supposed to.
That is why we do this work. That is why forensic science training, mitigation investigation, aggressive pretrial preparation, and full exploitation of every discovery right the law provides are not optional in serious criminal cases. They are the minimum standard of representation that the Constitution requires and that every defendant deserves.
If you or someone you love is facing capital murder charges or any serious criminal charge in Texas, call (214) 225-7117 or visit texasdwisite.com. The stakes are too high for anything less than the best defense available.